Town hall covers budget and new building

The Meeting Place is near completion after its completion date was previously pushed back.

During
the town hall meeting held on February 26, UTM Principal Ulrich Krull provided
an update on the Davis building’s construction, and commented on other projects
and initiatives the university is carrying out.

The Meeting Place is
near completion after its completion date of after reading week was pushed
back.

“it’s behind schedule,
but they’re working very hard to get it done,” said Krull. “It looks very
impressive. [The Davis Building] will reach its full glory once they start
working on expanding the student space outside. You will really begin to notice
the difference once they start constructing outside of the Davis building.”

According to Krull, the
road ways around the building will be shut down and the bus routes will need to
change.

In regard to the
prospective Arts, Culture, and Technology (ACT) building, Krull stressed that
it is a proposal under review that must still go to the central administration
for approval. There are no official plans to start constructing the building
yet.

“I mention this because
a lot of these types of projects can be derailed by the provincial government
announcement, which, in a sense, is a cut to us in terms of the funding. But
we’re not walking away from anything in the academic plan. This includes such
things as the construction projects […] We have to have a trade off somewhere
along the line in terms of what we’re going to do with those cuts.”

Currently, a planning
group is looking into the logistics of the building. The group has gone to the
community and collected all the “wishes” people would want for the ACT
building. The building has a nominal budget associated with it of near
$100-million dollars.

“If we were to delay the
opening of the ACT building, then we would actually have a fair amount of
saving to control for against the deficit.
All we have to do is delay some of that growth and some of the building
construction. But it only deals with the short-term reality.”

On the budget, Krull
stated that the university is still in the process of hiring new faculty and
staff positions, but are reassessing the feasibility of such hires.

“From a standpoint of
controlling costs we’re taking a look at what we can do to slow the growth of
positions on the academic side. Are there positions that don’t need to be
filled immediately?”

“For example,” Krull
continued, “we can slow the rate of hiring of faculty and staff. We can spread
out the hiring, so instead of hiring six positions at once, we can hire four
the first year and then two the next.”

In response to The Varsity’s article on the university’s supposed-plan to over enroll
students as a way to buffer the 10 per cent tuition cut, Krull stated, “We have
no interest in using international students to cover the amount of money that’s
being taken out of the system. There has been a lot of discussion in U of T for
a number of years on being an internationally significant university. And part
of that is about having an internationally significant population. The reality
is that UTM is in strong demand in the international sense.”

Krull also announced that
the Master of Urban Innovation (MUI) program has been delayed by a year because
it did not receive confirmation by the government. Therefore, many of the
students that would be eligible for OSAP are not.

However, they will continue
to hire staff for the program, and will accept their first cohort of students
in the September of 2020.

The final town hall of the
year will be held on March 26 at 5:00 p.m. in the Students’ Centre Presentation
Room.